Description
The artist book Mythopoeias is a hybrid publication combining collages and visual poetry.
Conceived as a thematic collection of collage and poem pairs, Mythopoeias features contemporary interpretations of female characters from myths, folk tales, fairy tales, fables, legends and literature, whose stories are told from the decidedly subjective, first-person perspective of its female author and narrator.
In Mythopoeias, the visual and textual narratives mutually illustrate each other. While the artist uses the collages to set the scene, she uses the poems to speculate on the imagined inner monologues or dialogues of the female characters, often focusing on a dramatic moment in their stories. The collages and poems reflect imaginatively on the mental and emotional states of female characters in orature and literature from around the globe, referencing a variety of historical sources from ancient Persian or Greek epics to Native American legends. The artist, however, situates these stories in the present by employing a contemporary visual and verbal vocabulary. At the same time, she uses their stories to tell yet another, more personal, story, which unravels in lyric verse across the pages of Mythopoeias.
The artist book is a culmination of two series of works that were made concurrently in the period 2017-2022. The book aims to represent various roles that women have repeatedly played in stories throughout history. But, in order to inhabit their perspective, Ana Čavić adopts their roles and reflects on the dramatic situations the female characters faced, filtering them through her own experiences. Following in the tradition of fabulism and employing an idiosyncratic visual and verbal language, the artist presents alternative versions of female characterisation and representation that have been poetically reimagined in a kind of self-conscious mythopoeia, or “myth-making”, and updated for contemporary audiences.
